


Will You Miss Me When I Burn and Will You Eye Me With a Longing

by Zagzagael



Category: Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-19 03:03:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1453060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zagzagael/pseuds/Zagzagael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How long has Daryl been aware of Beth? </p><p> </p><p>Title taken from Mark Lanegan's version of Will Oldham's gorgeous "You Will Miss Me When I Burn"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Sometimes, lying alone out in Hershel Greene’s pasture, he’d roll onto his back and look up through the frame of Merle’s bike, look at the moon still hanging in the sky as she had for countless millennia, dressed in lacey clouds. He would turn his head and look back across the gentle slope and rise of the land to the farmhouse lit up softly with shadows flickering off the glass windows. He would bend an arm behind his head, reach over for a long blade of grass and flick that between his teeth, chewing it down to a summery alfalfa taste, and he would keep an eye on the window he’d worked out as being hers. And then he would slit his eyes nearly closed and try to remember. 

Try to bring that first moment back into his mind’s eye. And for the life of him he just couldn’t. He knew she must have been one of the group of them that came out onto the wraparound front porch of the farmhouse to take stock of the newcomers. As their group pulled up in front of the house. But those moments got all confused with Rick and Lori and the relief of hearing that Carl was being tended to and would heal. It got all syrupy with emotion and he had had to take a step out of it to keep himself from pulling Rick into a male clasp and perhaps stuttering his own breath out of his lungs. He wasn’t ready for that kind of revelation.

But a few hours later, all of them standing around the cairn, attending a funeral for a stranger whose passing was somehow now tangled up with Carl’s survival, he had looked across the wheelbarrow full of field rock, and he thought that perhaps the end of all things had finally arrived. The ground shifted forward beneath his feet. She was standing there, just several simple strides away from him and his entire body flushed hot wet with a thin sheen of sweat, heart slamming against his ribcage, a sudden wild pain that had him turning slightly and pressing the heel of his hand into his breastbone. He glanced quickly around the circle of faces and no one else had seemed to feel the world shudder to a stop and re-start itself. It had only been him. Or so he thought for a long confusing moment. He looked back across the space that separated them and she was staring at him, in her soft way, all big blue eyes and sunlit hair, her head cocked the slightest bit as though taking his measure. And the confusion translated by her features looked more akin to mysterious than the bafflement that he was feeling. He realized, as their gazes locked for what could have only been seconds, that whatever body blow he had just taken, the impact had come from the fact that she was standing alive in the same world that he was occupying. As though the world itself had broken the hourglass of the sea and the shore and time was no more.

He wasn’t certain sure what it was about the slip of a teenaged girl that had rocked him on his feet, but he knew enough about the strange ways in which the world could reach out and touch you, hurt you, heal you, that there was something about her that had something to do with him. He didn’t know, just yet, what that connection could possibly be but without any reasonable explanation he decided that Beth Greene’s name was on the short list of names he had begun to meticulously etch onto the insides of each one of his rib bones. 

***

The morning after he got bow and gun shot and was recuperating in a bed that surely must have belonged to a Greene friend or family member, he decided he needed to get the hell out of the house and back into the camp before hallucinations of his brother returned to mock him for what a pansy-ass he was becoming. He knew he had displaced someone or at the very least, was disarranging himself from the places where he belonged. He had never in all his life laid his body down in a bed that smelled of fresh water and meadow flowers, softer than a mama dog’s belly. He had never, not once, woke in a room drenched in sunlight and sparkling clean like he was on the inside of a diamond. 

But more than all that intolerable comfort, was the luxurious torment of the golden girlchild waiting on him and learning his secrets long before he was ready to tell them.

She came in with his breakfast. Food on a kind of wooden tray, something that seemed to be straight out of a tv show he must have watched as a child, not anything he’d ever seen in his own life. Something that was as far removed from his reality as the scars that crisscrossed his back, seeping in the dark, his boy body quaking quiet like under the bed, was from her reality. He could not imagine and did not want to try, her father raising a belt and then a fist to her. 

She smiled, too sincere for it to be intended for him. She set the tray down and he pressed himself away and against the headboard and when he looked up she was staring, lip-bitten, at his naked shoulders, the curve of his chest, and the hard planes of his stomach. He saw this and grabbed for the sheets, dumping over the food, the glass of orange juice, the plate of scrambled eggs. All yellow on the hardwood floor. He was frozen in fear, but she was action and efficiency and flustered apology and she cleaned it up. When she went to fetch another he staggered from the bed, as though rising from a long drunk, and he stayed in the bathroom, crouched against the door, until he heard her come and go again. Then he sat on the lid of the commode, digging trenches into his thighs with his elbows, head in his hand, bewildered. 

He would try, for days, to tell himself that she was a mere slip of a girl. A teenaged girl. With a father and a sister and a tight group of people trying their hardest to keep her inside of a walled garden for as long as they possibly could do it. And in the marrow of his fracture-healed bones he understood that desire and that need. She was flowers and sunshine, soft breezes and freshly mown grass. But, of course, he knew it was just a matter of time before the new world broke down those walls and dragged their stinking rotting corpses into her world, reached out and touched her. 

He hadn’t known, then, that she was already a survivor. He didn’t know how the thick fabric of her grief had been wound tight on the bolt of her body, insulating the vulnerable insides of her.

So, on the terrible day that Shane unloosed the secrets of the barn, the day he watched a child turned monster stumble out of the dark shadows and into the light in which her mother had fallen to her knees screaming in horror and disbelief and he did the only thing he could do because he could not raise his crossbow and put the small skull in his sights, refused to see her now that she’d been found, instead he restrained the mother from flinging herself into her own dark demise. In those suffocating minutes, he watched Beth from the ground, holding fast to Carol, thinking that Carol’s pain was the only pain. His pain not even worth considering. But then Hershel’s child unraveled herself to tatters, shredded by her own loss and grief and disbelief. He watched, eyes opened wide and unblinking, as the undead mother reached for her own flesh and blood, all clawing hands and gnashing teeth and hunger for human meat. Or just hungry period. 

Later he would wonder, maybe that’s what the infection was, hunger. Soul ravenousness that could not be sated. The world was starving. People had just grown too hungry. 

He knew he had spent his lifetime famished. He drug his emptied body out into a far field, set up camp, and raged against the gnawing pain.

***

He had been walking, fast and purposeful, but with no purpose at all, across the camp the others had set up in the shade of the trees encircling the house. He was restless and moving his body helped to keep him from indulging in his own unique brand of stupid. He was going to need to find some sort of outlet in this new world for the splinters that were always festering just beneath the first layer of his skin. He skirted a tree, slowing down and looking up into the amazing arching canopy of branches and leaves. The earth wasn’t infected, just the human population, and here was as healthy a bit of life as one could hope to see. He stopped, sucking the corner of his lower lip between his teeth, chewing thoughtfully and considering climbing up as high as the tree would allow. Get a different perspective on some things, maybe.

Just then he heard a slight commotion inside the house. Small enough to go unnoticed by most but he noticed things. He turned his head, listening hard, women’s voices hushed and urgent and calling her name. He took off at a run, leaped two of the porch steps at a time and banged through the front screen door, the force of him slamming it open, crashing it back into the jamb ricocheting the sound of a shot throughout the interior of the house.

They were in the kitchen. Maggie and Patricia and the girl crumpled onto the spic and span clean linoleum floor. He recognized the emotion draining out of the faces of the two women. He’d seen it on Rick’s face and Carol’s face. He knew better than to seek out his own reflection. He breathed in and out fast, then held the air in his lungs, standing awkward on the threshold of the room before finally taking long strides across the space, hip banging into the table, and kneeling down beside her. He gently grasped her by the shoulders and turned her onto her back, fingers at her throat, although he didn’t really know how to seek out her pulse, but then it was there, just under the pads of his fingers pressing into the slender column of her neck and he exhaled.

“She’s okay. She’s okay. Just too much for her, maybe. I guess. Ya know,” he trailed off, looking from one pair of eyes to the other. Then single-shoulder shrugged, the crossbow hitting him just between the blades of his bones. 

Maggie had risen and was running a dishcloth under the water, wringing it out, handing it to Daryl who had no idea whatsoever regarding the use of such a thing. He handed it back up to her and she knelt beside him, folding it in a long rectangle across Beth’s forehead. Beneath his palm, he could feel how clammy she was, and he let his hand linger on her skin for a moment longer before pulling it away and sitting back on his heels.

“Should get her up. Lay her down somewhere that ain’t the floor, huh.”

“Of course,” Patricia said, bending over for the washcloth. “Let’s put her in her bed.”

Both women straightened and looked at him expectantly. He had never in all his life carried a woman. But he hunkered down again and slipped his arms beneath her body, and hefted her up against his chest and stood. She was nothing but lightness and he adjusted to her weight, turning and following the two women out of the room and up the stairs. That was a bit more work than he would have thought and he was breathing heavily by the time they reached the second floor. Her head had lolled sideways, her cheek pressed against his collarbone and he realized that the weight of her in his arms was more responsibility than he’d ever had in his hands once.

He followed Patricia into the room he himself had convalesced in, Maggie stepping aside in the hallway. When the bedding was pulled back he braced his knees hard against the rolled edge of the mattress and strengthened his spine to lower her to supine without straining something bad in his bones. He had no warning that he would carefully untangle his fingers from her hair and smooth it back over her temple until he was actually doing it. Slowly her eyes opened, unseeing and staring and he stepped back fast from her as though she were a Louisiana rattler. He took another frantic step back and his shoulders hit the far wall of the room and his eyes went to half-mast as he watched the two women tend to the girl. 

He knew he had been sleeping in someone’s bed. He filed away the fact that it was Beth’s room in a small hand-crafted box inside his mind. All cedar and smelling of heartwood. He wanted nothing more than to stand in the slanting sunlight falling onto the floor and watch over her, but instead he turned and fled back to the wide open world. 

He found his way back up to her bedroom late in the afternoon of the next day, remembering the sharp bones of her body pressing invisible bruises into the meat of his flesh. He scowled at himself. Patricia was sitting watch and looked at him with confusion as he took a tentative step into the room. 

It was as though Beth had transformed in front of all their eyes. Blonde hair waving across her pillow, dressed in white eyelet, unseeing eyes seeing things that the rest of them only saw in nightmares.

He stood, uncomfortable, in the doorway. He knew nothing of fairy tales and fabled yarns. He did not liken her to Sleeping Beauty. He did not realize that if watch had not been kept over her, he might have found himself compelled to kneel beside the bed, leaning down into her beautiful face and considering her lips as though they were something for him to think upon at all. He would not have been able to attest to the magic of kissing her awake. But he did recognize the tipping of his heart towards her, felt the unfathomable winding of a skein between the spindles of their bodies, and none of it made sense so he turned quickly on his heel, taking the stairs in a staccato rush of his boot soles before disappearing out into the gloaming. 

The next morning he found the small rose garden behind the house and used his knife to cut a long-stemmed yellow bud just beginning to curl open. He took it inside and in the kitchen found Maggie making a breakfast tray for her sister. He held the rose out, helpless, voiceless, and she took it from him with a close-lipped smile. He put his thumb in his mouth and sucked the blood off where the thorn had dug into his flesh.


	2. Chapter 2

Over the years of his life, he had felt the heavy viscera of each one of the organs as they hung suspended inside of his body. Cramping in pain, stilled in fear, bruised and healed, hammered and beaten, beating and hammering, bloodied and bleeding. How the reality of the outside affected the corporeality of his insides. 

But never had he felt his heart freeze solid behind his hyperboreal lungs while his brain boiled inside his amative skull.

Beth had slit her wrists.

He overheard this and, in that long drawn out moment while he processed the fact of it, the bedrock of his bones began to cool, his blood ice up, and his lungs ablate themselves so that the muscles of his heart chilled solid in the frigid air trapped inside the cavity of his chest. He dropped his head, scowling at the ragged grass beneath his feet, a lawn that the Greene girl had surely spent seemingly endless days of summer cavorting upon. He looked up at the sprawling farmhouse, seeking out the window of the room he knew was hers, considering her lying down in the forever sleep, longest winter night of her life. He closed his eyes and listened to the frantic whisperings of Lori and Rick with such ferocious focus that his ears became the magnifying glass of the hushed conversation. The meaning behind the words themselves burning a small hole into his mind, flames consuming his brain. 

Somehow, in some way, Andrea had played a part. He narrowed his eyes and looked through the twilight, through the group’s camp, seeking out the blonde. And there she was, his gaze serpentine and deadly found her, standing all hip cocked next to Shane, prideful jutting of her chin. Daryl's hands fisted at his sides. He harbored no affection for either one of the two and his distrust of Shane now boiled over onto Andrea. So, Beth’s sister had forbid this woman to enter their home again. Threatened her to keep away. He would make sure she did.

His held breath was hurting him, and he closed his eyes and exhaled quietly. He felt a tremor run up the outsides of each long bone in his thigh, settling into the sockets of his hips, aching. If Beth had forsaken hope, then perhaps all of them were well and truly lost. 

Hopeless. 

Rick had asked a question, he missed the words, but here was Lori, shrugging in resigned justification, telling him that Andrea had proven the point, her point. The Greene girl wanted to live. And, Lori said in finality, Beth had chosen life.

He needed to see her, measure the distance between her feet and the edge that each of them had sworn to skirt. For the sakes of one another. She did not know, yet, that they were family. He needed to feel his blood call to her again, recognize her as kith and kin. Member of the pack.

But more, he needed to forgive her. 

He could not find his way to her. The wagons had circled. The doors and windows pulled closed. The rugs rolled up so that footsteps would be heard. He kept watch, on the small hill downwind of the house. He protected her from his distance. Maggie at the glass, then Patricia, Jimmy, that fool of a boy, and at sunrise, Hershel, all looking at him across the expanse over which he stood guard. 

Finally, he cornered Maggie at the chicken coop.

“How’s your sister?” he began, hands not minding him, so he stuffed one deep in his front pocket and grabbed fast to one of the limbs of his bow, fingers curling and uncurling in nervousness. “Beth,” he added, needing to say her name out loud.

She looked at him from a sideways tilted head. He wondered if she could hear the hammer blows of his heart or if she had gathered how Beth's name had slipped from his mouth as though a secret.

“She’s alright. Thank you for asking.”

He nodded, not knowing how to enter the conversation he wanted to have, ask for the answers he needed to hear. “Heard it was bad. She gonna be okay?” 

“It was bad.” She lowered her arm holding a bucket of chicken feed. “Not as bad as I first thought it might be. What did you hear?”

He was offended by her suspicious tone. It emboldened him. Who was she to protect Beth from him? “I ain’t no gossip, if that’s what you’re implyin’.”

Her mouth fell open, he had called her out. “Oh! No. I mean, I’m sorry, that was rude. And I weren’t meaning you. Just,” she paused, “others. Wish folks wouldn’t talk about my family.”

“It might be we’re all family now.”

She turned her face away from him. And it made him want to insist upon it to her, reassure her that he could step up as brother.

“She took a table knife, we got it away from her, but someone,” she hesitated and it bristled the short hairs on his neck.

“Yeah.”

“Andrea said something to her, then left her alone. On purpose. Bethy broke a mirror-"

“That’s bad luck right there,” he told her, thinking of Beth’s seven years owed now.

“She cut…” Maggie lifted the bucket and covered her left wrist with the fingers of her right hand, “…used a piece of the mirror….she made a small cut into her wrist, her arm. It was bleeding like crazy but just for a minute and we patched her up.”

He nodded, more to himself, than to the word picture Maggie was painting for him. “Sounds like she mighta changed her mind.”

“I think so. She’s not like that. I mean, wantin’ attention for herself, or wantin’ to die. She’s-“

He cut her off. “I know.” And suddenly he did. He had needed some kind of acid trip flashback of Merle to brutalize him into saving his own life, Beth had been all alone in the bathroom, and pulled herself up out of the depths of her own hell. He nodded his appreciation then turned and headed for the woods. He didn’t need to stand sentinel anymore. 

***

Each and every time his fist connected with Randall’s face, he thought of Beth. Thought of how he had been born male and she had come squalling into the world female. How his bones and muscles, his fists and feet, had been made to protect her. 

The skin over his knuckles split and spit blood across the boy rapist’s face. 

There were such differences between wolfpacks and bands of rabid dogs. He wanted to put this one down. Out of its pathetic misery.

***

Moments had been ripped away from them. Minutes ripped clean out of the hour, the way that Dale’s insides had been torn out of his body. Paralyzed by shock and fear and pain, his movements were slow and filled with a humanity that Daryl could hardly bear to see. The death of a human being a dignified desolation, a message scrawled in bile to the gods. This body was my experience of the world. This life was my gift and I give it back. In this leaving know that I was here. 

The contrast of the passing over of the living to the death of the dead. It was gruesome and terrible and respectful. 

He watched as Rick staggered one step backwards, away from the responsibility. The man’s shoulders slumped beneath the load too heavy and Daryl felt his own back strengthen as he took the weight. He rolled his head on his neck and stepped up beside the displaced man of law and justice. There was no more justice. The undead had devoured it. With great purpose he gentled the mortal instrument away from Rick and it was the biggest gun he had ever had his finger on the trigger of. The long barrel jerked sideways as he brought it up to bead. He steadied his hand on the grip, still warm. _We don’t kill the living,_ echoed in the back of his mind. But we do, he thought, when they need us to.

An apology, a silent invocation, _go now brother_. The report of the single gunshot in the night, echoing painfully off the eardrums of every person standing witness. 

He turned his head, eyelids straining to blind him. Beth was standing just there, watching him with eyes filled to overflowing. He did not know if she was weeping for Dale or for him.


	3. Chapter 3

He sat on the chopper, booted feet on the ground, and watched the Greene Farm burn. Overrun by Walkers, the choking chaos of this new horror was thicker than the smoke from the barn. He could barely breathe, the reality more acrid than the air. He could see the writhing bodies of the undead within the flames and found it fitting, a hell on earth. _Burn, you sad motherfuckers, burn._ He nodded to himself in dark satisfaction.

Listening through the din of Walker growls and guttural moans, he could hear shots. Rick’s python was explosive. He had an unshakable faith in the man. The cracking of the big .357 a modern male shout of primitive triumph. Into the fray, out of the fire. Slaughter and mayhem. They'd be okay, he knew this without hesitation. He sniffed and narrowed his eyes, recognizing the rapid report of a hunting rifle, either Hershel or Jimmy. Not Maggie, he had seen her and Glenn in the compact. The vindicating mowing down of the riot shotgun out the side window. He knew it couldn’t be Beth because he’d seen her running with Patricia and Lori to the Ford truck that T-Dog was expertly manhandling through straggled lurching bodies. He had watched frantic as Patricia was torn from Beth’s hands, beginning to gun the bike through the herd, until he saw Lori haul her to safety, up into the cab. 

The free-for-all fleeing of the farm. He wondered, brief as a spark, what they would each be leaving behind.

Suddenly he heard a feminine scream and quickly spied Carol running through a small group of Walkers. He took one last look at the burning barn, the farmhouse, the wraparound porch, and the window on the second floor behind the elm, but it was pointless. He would not remember his days here in any semblance to this terrible night. This was a demonic portal opening, pouring forth the unimaginable. His time here had also been a door opening. Inside his chest wall. He had not even another minute, never did really, for sentimental thought, he shouted to the older woman to jump on, steadying her with a strong hand while she swung a leg over, stunned pillion.

He wide-opened the throttle on the bike and was relieved when he felt Carol shift away from his back and reach behind her to hold on fast to the shortened sissy bars. Gapping a space between them. He knew without thinking about it that if anyone touched the skin of his body right now it would be flayed clean from his bones. 

What god in heaven would allow each one of his children, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, to die screaming.

***

Hours later and the sun rose, heralding a new day and he couldn’t help but feel his spirits lift with the light. He and Carol climbed back on the bike, he ignored her wincing, recognizing the familiar bike-sore feeling. They headed out, without need of conferring, heading back to the clogged highway.

He passed no judgment on himself when he caught sight, _finally finally_ , of Beth’s white-blonde head through the wide rear window of the Ford and he felt the promise made by the sunrise fulfilled. He could see her crumpled beneath Lori’s arm. He pulled up beside them and nodded to T-Dog who cast him a blank and deadened look and Lori who narrowed her gaze at the sight of his relief. And then, at last, Beth raised her head from Lori’s shoulder and her wounded eyes were reminiscent of a cornered doe fawn. He looked away, but selfishly rejoiced.

Reunited, the chill in his bones dissipated completely with the sight of Beth tucked up close to her daddy. But then the knowledge that Andrea might be alive and alone froze him. He held himself responsible, thinking of his distrust of her, how she had shot him, how he had opened up to her the night Sophia had gone missing. Standing beside the car with the name of Carol’s child scrawled across the glass he thought he might drown in a sea of recrimination. He would go back, he told them, he would find Andrea or, what didn't need to be said aloud, lay her undead self to rest. It was the right thing to do.

Rick held him off with a look, a hard and heartfelt glance that both men kept suspended between them for a long moment, translating the unspoken language. Later he would marvel at how the two of them were growing easy against one another. Reaching down with the male grasp to pull the other up to a higher level, a hand under an unsteady elbow, a bone-knowledge of their role in this new family. 

In all his life he had never had another man do right by him the way this man was doing. 

If the race of humans were dying in abandonment and torment, then it was up to those left living to exist in self-possession and grace.

***

Late the same day, the Suburban gasped its last fume of gasoline and the group stood stranded and uneasy on the side of a ruined road. He rocked himself, from one foot to the other, the weight of his crossbow in both hands. He watched from the corners of his eyes as Beth trembled beside Hershel. Uncertain, unsure, and numbed by fright. He wanted to stand beside her and scowled at the impossibility of the distance between them. Carol was by his shoulder, a nagging persistent whine in his ear, and he tamped down an urge to bite out at her. If it wasn’t Beth he needed just behind his left shoulder, then it was he himself who wanted to be standing at Rick’s side. He could feel how faltering the ligaments that joined his bones were becoming. Could feel the beckoning folding of himself, the pull of the cold ground on his warm flesh. He walked, paced, watched and observed and agreed with the Sheriff. 

Then he strolled with purpose up next to him and took him verbally into the woods where they hunted in companionable silence until he could finally discern some of the stress that ran taut across the other man’s shoulders lessen and release the limbered spine. He saw the moment it happened and he smiled to himself. One more squirrel and they could hike backwards to the utility dam. 

Dark fell with a slow and steady dimming of the sunlight and the inevitability of it comforted him. He was resigned now to Carol shadowing him in the flickering light of the campfire he and Glenn had stoked to life. He hunkered down over the small carcasses, dinner, and nodded to the Greene’s when they sat heavily on the other side of the warmth. Beth still close enough to Hershel to nearly be in his lap. It injured him, to see the vulnerability in her face, the curve of her body towards her father. He wanted to offer himself, kneel before them and take an oath of chivalry, swear fealty and vow protection. A knight’s code. 

Instead, he had Carol hissing at him about honor and he very nearly snapped. “What is it you want?” he asked her and there was a danger laced through his words that she recognized so quickly that it pricked him. But then she settled away from him, glance cast sideways, and he stared into the fire relieved and slightly ashamed. 

He understood fear. But had outgrown it decades before. Quaking under the bed, quivering inside a closet, pressed up between the tv and the corner of the front room, it had been stripped off him as though it were a salvation army coat that didn’t really belong to him by rights. He’d had to grow his own protective layer, thicken his skin, hide his voice, lower his head and hold onto the fact that the sun rose and set every single day. No one could change that. He simply had to remember not to be afraid anymore.

They were afraid. He got that. But he wasn’t about to let that fear become hysterics. And he wasn’t going to turn bared teeth on the pack leader.

That night, Rick’s steady hand warm on his shoulder, roused him from a shallow sleep. He rose and stretched his arms out high above his head, took up the crossbow and followed the other man to the gap in the surrounding wall. They stood together, without speaking, for comfortable minutes. Then Rick nodded and returned to the dying fire where he lay down with an ocean of dirt between him and his wife. Daryl turned his face away from this as though he had seen his friend unclothed.

During his watch, he kept his eye on the shapes of trees, the roadway, their cars parked up on the small overpass, and Beth asleep. Just before dawn he saw three feral dogs trotting past the vehicles, stopping to mark the back tire of his bike, he watched them quietly. Strangely comforted and deeply reassured. He knew that domesticated pigs set free will grow wired hair down the lengths of their spines and wicked-sharp dangerous tusks. He wondered if he, too, would grow long in the tooth, sharper in the eye and ear, and with a mat of wolfish hair across the backs of his shoulders that could be raised like hackles.


	4. Chapter 4

The sky had sheltered more life in its black and blue embrace than any of them could begin to try to imagine. The earth remembered. And there had been long nights in which they had tried to imagine, strove to remember, individually and collectively, that life could be achingly beautiful. For all the good it did, which was no good at all.

The world still journeyed her long way around the sun, whether they were alive or dead or undead. Autumn became Winter, and it felt sad, the first Winter after the world had turned for them, the seasonal dream turned nightmare, the long hot days of death and dying behind them but there was no reprieve, just colder days and nights, ice-slicked vagabondage and the frozen rictus of corpses. He was cold, they were all cold, extra food and blankets went to Lori and Carl. He didn’t know people well but he knew the ground beneath his feet in the way a lover knows another’s body map and found that he could wait in the long nights for the days to begin to stretch and heat once again. Believe that the sun would call forth new life, wake the world back up. 

The roughshod first days had become routine, life had slowed down, and hours were spent in search of food and shelter. Putting in that kind of time with one another was shifting the sense they had of individuality, of identity, of being separate.

The group of them were becoming clan, as Daryl had figured they might if given enough chance and wildness. Close quarters and living on top of one another was forcing their blood to recognize each member as brethren. And that was okay. Growing from stranger to brother wasn’t something that could happen overnight and being stronger together wasn’t simply about numbers, it was about learned familial ties. Learning a thing took time and he was badly in need of being taught. 

They were more wolf pack than traditional human family, but he didn’t know enough about families, traditional or otherwise, to really know for certain. He knew that roles were changing and shifting with each day, each week, and each passing month. Siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles. Maternal and paternal. Only Maggie and Glenn seemed to tangle up their relationship into a knot and he watched the two of them become more, while Rick and Lori continued to reduce each other until they were so much less. 

The love was confusing to him, the loyalty not. And he tried to follow the beat and pull of his own heart’s blood, warming and cooling, recognize how his body responded to these people. 

He watched Lori grow more fecund and he marveled at this. The lifeforce more powerful than any infection or reanimated corpses. As Hershel thumbed the small leather-bound bible he kept on his person, mouthing scripture, eyes closed, finger on the words, Daryl looked at the pregnant gravid and found his own faith stirring, restoring, settling. He wanted nothing more than to place his hand, flat, on her belly and feel the unborn child kick the way that the others were doing but he could not bring himself to ask for such a liberty.

He watched as the baby fat skimmed itself off the bones of Beth and Carl. 

Saw Carl’s legs lengthen and his childish temper fall away, how his eyes began to narrow in thought and his lips press together to give him time to consider a thing or two things. Daryl’s own boyhood had been filled with narrowed eyes and pursed lips, his head always cocked to the side to keep him from looking folks in the face, to keep his sharp ears tuned. Listening hard for the last drink to be drunk out of a bottle of cheap rotgut, for a door to slam open or shut real quiet like. Listening for an adult, or a pack of kids, to pick him out of a crowd. He saw Carl learning to listen, and Daryl gently guided him to the sounds that mattered now. A Walker shuffling, groaning, moving in a group or alone. 

Fear, trepidation, knowledge, awareness. There was a power in understanding what one was becoming aware of.

He wiped this truth to a shine, using it as a mirror, wanting to see his own awareness about the girl reflected back at him. He found he could not indulge himself, his desire to pay attention, watching her from the surreptitious corners of his eyes. It made him suspicious of his own intentions. So, although he would have let himself be laid open to protect her, use his body as diverting shield so that she might escape unscathed, would push himself to exhaustion to clear one more house, harvest one more garden, rifle one more pantry, in spite of this willingness he wore as though it were chainmail, he had to hold himself away from her. He recognized her youth, that she was just on the far edges of it and he wanted her to be there as long as he could make it possible. He had never been allowed to occupy that space himself, dashing into tight corners where belt lashes ricocheted and fists smashed with less force, making himself scarce, unseen, unheard, unknown. She was present to him, seen and heard.

He listened for her breathing at night while she slept, began to know the sound of her light step, the sweet bird-like cadence of her voice when she spoke. To anyone. The timber and the tone of her words didn’t change dependent upon whom she was speaking with or to, not like other folks’ voices tended to do. But more than all that was the discovery that Beth could sing, that she loved to sing, and that she was very, very good. She sang when she was working, small swallowed tunes, she sang when her poppa asked her to, quiet folk songs, and she sang when she thought she was alone, which he insured she never, ever was. Not entirely. He knew little to less than nothing about popular music, but when he tipped his head and narrowed his eyes and pressed his lips together to hear her sing by herself, he knew the songs were of her own creating. Recognized words that had been spoken or unspoken, discerned the rhythm of the days they were spending in her melodies. 

The girl was stronger than any of them were willing to give her credit for. He begrudgingly thought that maybe Andrea had done right by her, offered her a glimpse into her own dark corners, and encouraged her to look hard into the shadows and not flinch.

More than ever now, he was intensely aware of her, but he mellowed his enrapture to a softened consanguinity, brother, cousin, uncle. Protector, guardian, provider.

***

He gave himself over entirely to Rick as dull and allowed the other man to sharpen the blade, call forth the elemental properties that inhabited his body, temper him in the fire of necessity, and hammer him into a shape that was lean and powerful and designed for protection. He welcomed this transformation but it gave him pause when he brought it into the forefront of his thoughts. The difference between self-protection and selfless protection. He knew that he had somehow been charged with the responsibilities that men had been bearing for tens of thousands of years and he could feel how his bones were hardening, his blood thickening, his lungs expanding and his heart strengthening. With purpose. This, then was why he had been born. In the world before it turned he was too much or not enough. He was violently unfinished. In this world he became a man. He did not have to shape himself the way the world would have him, not now, now the world shaped itself around the steel of his skeleton, the machine of his heart. 

***

He would still catch Beth looking at him. He had spent his life aware of when he had come under someone’s scrutiny, stumbled into their attention. It was as fine-tuned a skill as any he had taught himself. 

In the old world she would not have given him a second glance. But now she saw him.

He could feel her gaze on him and at first it was as uncomfortable as a bout of poisoned ivy, he knew better than to scratch at it but still it spread beneath his clothing, waking him at night. 

***

He had never in all his life spent enough time around a woman, and certainly never a group of women, to know how they cycled. Crude jokes he’d heard about menstruating and mood swings barely served to have him understanding the ways in which women’s bodies were so very different from men’s bodies. How the female body ruled supreme in its complexities. 

All of them began to move within the lunar push and pull, the ebb and flow of the oceans contained inside the femaleness of Carol, Maggie, and Beth. At first he had no idea what was happening, the storm that would slowly gather between each one of them, rising to a dark crescendo. 

He could feel the air itself shifting, thickening, electrifying. And then each one of them - man, woman, child - would become engulfed in two days’ worth of drenching emotional weather, the physical release, and a slow drying out time. 

By the third month, he began to sort it out. No one had to explain it to him. He simply began to be aware of it, added it to those things which had become part of his world. The men would scatter to the far edges of the group. Make runs if necessary, look away from rags rinsed clean in bloodied water, tolerate tears or sharp words. They would lower their voices to soothing registers, dampen their own sparks to prevent igniting tempers, parcel out brief shoulder rubs and tentative smiles. 

He began to learn tenderness.

***

It was a ridiculous mistake. On all three of their parts. Maggie and Glenn more than his. Early morning, everyone asleep inside a well-kept two-story Post WWII cottage on the edge of a small town, he was always the last watch of the night, first watch of the day because he was an early riser and the best small game hunting was dawn, just before the world was sprung new with sunlight. 

They must have been desperate for one another because they never heard him push the garage door open or step silent into the sunrise shadows of the detached building. 

For a strange moment he simply could not identify the sounds he was hearing. And he kept crouch walking, crossbow raised, through the doorway, into the spring chill of the interior, around the far side of a pristine and vintage Oldsmobile and there they were nearly naked as the day they both were born. Later he would smirk to himself that they had each kept their boots on. Smart. 

Maggie’s eyes were closed tight but her face relaxed, mouth open and panting, her face pressed up tight against Glenn’s head. The fluid masculine pumping of his hips, a male cry she was coaxing from him with her hands pressing fingertip bruises into the white flesh of his lower back. It took the clockwork of his heart stopping, seconds stilled, before he really figured out what he was seeing and then he stumbled backwards, biting out a curse word, kicking himself for that, and then turned and fled, pulling the man door shut with a meaningful small slamming sound. Outside he leaned hard and heavy against the wooden door, the air trapped inside his lungs, his heart gears meshing again and time moving forward. 

He shook his head and realized that what he thought he had heard was the sound of mourning doves.

***

If he was keeping the blood inside his veins temperate when she was around, during the day, staying up ahead sticking close to Rick or falling back beside Carl, he could reason with himself that in the old world scheme of men and women, things still made sense. But it was at night, willing his body to let go of the world, to fall away into sleep, to put a few hours of necessary trust into Rick or T-Dog, Maggie and Glenn, that his own internal gore grew fevered and she would enter his dreams and keep him company for a while. 

Every time he laid his body down and closed his eyes.

***

He was standing in the kitchen of the house they had taken refuge for a long week. The women had tried cleaning it up but there was no point, they were cooking on a barbecue in the backyard, using the kitchen more as storage of their daily raids than anything remotely domestic. Bathrooms would always be useless. They simply wanted the familiarity of a house to sleep in, the safety of doors and windows that could be barricaded. He stood looking out the window, trying to avoid seeing his own face in the glass, lost in a moment of emptiness when Lori came through from the darkened living room. It was late and most were asleep.

“Daryl. Here. Here, Daryl,” Lori called to him in a whisper. He looked up sharp and suspicious but her face was open and full of wonderment. 

“Huh?” he asked, trying to soften his voice.

“Give me your hand,” she said and turned her body towards him. 

He could not. He would not lift his arm. She reached over and took him by the wrist and pulled his bent fingers to her body and gave him an impatient look until he flattened his palm against the hard ridge of her pregnancy and sulked in terror and fear. He could not meet her eyes while she held him fast, fingers around his wrist, and then he felt her flesh undulate beneath his hand, felt the kick kick kick of the unborn babe within. And he closed his eyes, his heart trip hammering, his blood singing down his veins, a promise to this life. Blood blood blood. Family. He looked up and the mother was smiling at him, joyful in her own recognition of the life of her child, her face was shining. 

His mouth had fallen open and he twisted his lips closed and reluctantly tugged his hand away from her fast grip, dipping his head, mumbling a thanks and watching her turn and head back out into the other room, leaving him alone in the cold kitchen. But he was warm now. 

He turned on his heel, quietly slipping out the mud room door to go in search of Rick, relieve him of his watch. He felt flushed with purpose.

***

He knew that Carol was sensing how the sap was rising in him. She began to circle him closer and closer, pushing herself up right against him. He chose to treat it lightly, could see no point in embarrassing both of them by confronting her with it. 

He was waiting for something else, someone else.


	5. Chapter 5

He never knew his grandfathers, on either his momma or his daddy’s side. His momma said her daddy was in prison for manslaughter and he accepted it same as if she had told him his grandpappy was in Florida. His daddy would rage from time to time, fighting drunkenly with the ghost of his own father and that was enough for him to know that his paternal grandfather wasn’t a man he wanted to ever run across. He still woke sweating and paralyzed from nightmares in which both men hunted him in a twisted woods.

Hershel was a mystery to him. At first, on the farm, he thought he understood the older man, the distance he put between his family and the group of them. His sense of protection. The ultimatums stated in no-nonsense terms. The group was to make themselves scarce and that was the end of that. Daryl was okay with it. He hadn’t expected refuge but once Shane and Rick and Lori began to rise up against the farmer’s desires, he wondered why they felt entitled and he simply did not.

In the end it didn’t much matter, after all. 

In the immediate days after they lost the farm, he became quietly fascinated at the depth of Hershel’s despair. It was short-lived and that was something, too. Watching this elder male process the new world, how unforgiving it was, how that truth somehow softened the man’s own sense of forgiveness. It took weeks before Daryl realized the only person Hershel held responsible was himself. He never once cursed his god, and he never once lost his faith. The only soul he would not plead forgiveness for was his own. 

They shared this curse.

***

One easy night, the group asleep, he was on watch even though it wasn’t his watch. Rick was out the back door, taciturn and ever vigilant, and he was sitting on a ladder back chair on the front porch, too tired to sleep. He heard someone rising and watched through the cracked door as Hershel pulled himself up slow from the floor, all aching joints and creaking bones, moving out of the front room where the rest of them lay sleeping. _Like a slumber party_ , Maggie had said the first time they ever bedded down in such a manner, and he had no good idea what that meant exactly. 

He nodded hello to Hershel as he pushed the front door open and joined him on the small cement stoop. 

“Those aren’t good for you. I know you know that, though.”

“Might kill me, huh? Damn.” Daryl smirked kindly, blowing two steady streams of white smoke out of both his nostrils. “Don’t make me feel guilty about this, old man.” 

Hershel smiled. “I need you to stay healthy. I need to believe that you’re going to be around for a while.”

“Why’s that?”

Hershel turned his face away, looking out across the suburban lawn gone to seed. Gazing down the darkened silent street. “I believe in you, Daryl. And I feel safer for my girls knowing you’re in this world, that you’re part of this-” he trailed off, making a small gesture with one hand.

“Family?”

“Yes. Family.” Daryl listened to the relief in the old man’s voice. “That you’re part of this family.”

***

The masculine soft-heartedness with which Hershel parented his daughters smoothed over Daryl’s scarred memories of his battered childhood as though a healing balm. It was Hershel and his growing capacity for holding them all in a state of grace that taught Daryl more about family, what a family should be, what they owed one another, what they could expect from one another, than any other member of the group.

He watched, he listened, and he learned.

Family is sacrifice, family is seeing another person in need and providing, family is listening, and family is guidance. Love, loyalty, and fierce fierce protection. They were becoming clan.

***

T-Dog had winded himself with abject fear and was leaning hard against the side of the pickup truck when Daryl dispatched the last of the two Walkers who had been frighteningly faster than the other man’s slower movements. 

He lowered the crossbow, exhaling, narrowing his eyes and trying with all his might to swallow down the biting criticism that was heavy and sharp on his tongue. He swagger-walked over beside him and pulled the crumpled pack of filterless Camels out of his breast pocket and peered inside. One smoke left and a disposable lighter. He handed the whole thing to T-Dog. “Here,” he said gruffly. “It helps.”

T-Dog nodded his appreciation and lit the cigarette with a shaking hand. 

Daryl had to look away.

“I don’t belong here, man. I do not belong trapped in this nightmare.”

“None of us do.”

T-Dog turned his head and looked at him. Daryl noted that he didn’t offer to share the cigarette. “You belong here. It’s like you were born for this.”

“That ain’t fair. You think if I could wake up from this and have it all be a fucken dream that I wouldn’t?”

He lowered his gaze, smoking and nodding. Then he looked up again. “Yeah, that’s what I think.”

“Hell.”

“It’s making you a better man. I was a better man before all this shit.”

Daryl leveraged himself off the side of the truck and walked around to the driver’s side door, settling his body down into the seat as though his bones could no longer support the weight of his skin, and he rolled his forehead on the steering wheel. 

***

The women he had known in the old world, his before life, were hard edged dangerously sharp broken shards. He didn’t recognize any of the women in this new world. The archetypes of mother, daughter, sister, warrior. He had never known women could be like Lori, Carol, Maggie. Beth. He didn’t know that some women were soft and that they could soften all the jagged edges of the world. 

He hadn’t known that he needed the world to be soft. But he did. 

***

It took long months before Beth became completely accustomed to rifling stores and entering homes. She would stand on the front lawn of a house, chewing her lower lip, hands useless at her sides. At first various members would try to reason this reluctance out of her but he knew she had to find her own way so he let her stand outside and would return after the first sweep to wait on her while everyone else went on inside. He made a pretense out of scouring the road, the surrounding houses, counting cars, memorizing where the sun was rising and setting, but after a while he let all that go and he would just walk back outside, glance over at her frozen in place, and stand between her and the road with his back to her while she wrestled with her own thoughts.

It wasn’t until she wanted something for herself that he began to get a sense of how deep her struggles were. On the sidewalk, outside of a stationer’s, she hung back and he circled around, completely aware of where she was at all times. The rest had ducked into a pharmacist’s. She was looking through the plate glass, into the shadowy store, with a sad kind of longing that bent his heart.

“What is it, girl?” he asked her. “Whadya want in there?”

She shook her head to the side. Her lips pressed tight together.

“Just tell me what it is.”

“It’s stupid.”

“I doubt that.” He made a decision, lifting the tire iron and jimmying the door open. “C’mon.” 

She didn’t move. 

“C’mon now. But ya gotta be quick about it, huh. Don’t want the others to worry 'bout where we are.”

This moved her feet as he thought it might. He already recognized her feeling of responsibility to the group. She followed him into the dark interior. The smell reminded him of a school room and long forgotten memories surfaced for him as he made his way down one side and up the other checking for Walkers. “It’s clear,” he reassured her. “Get what you want, Beth.”

She moved quickly, efficiently. She knew exactly what she was after and he watched her pick out a small bound journal and a box of pens. She crouched and shoved them into her backpack. 

“Grab yourself enough to last,” he told her although he really had no idea what she wanted with such things. “It’s alright. Really.”

She nodded and reached for another. This time she hesitated and her hand hovered over a book that even he could tell was the pricier option. After a moment, she reached for the plain black one, same as the one she already had, and slipped it down into her pack.

“Let’s go,” he told her. 

“Thank you, Daryl,” she smiled at him before falling into place just behind his left shoulder. 

He could feel her there. His small secret.


End file.
